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Sunday, November 23, 2014

Silja Line cruise – Herpaderp galore!

Hi hiii peeps!

Ahead is a summary of my derpalicious Silja Line cruise trip with geeky company, but first I'm just going to mention some other stuff really quickly! You see, real life has been pretty hectic lately; I'm drowning in important meetings and whatnot that I have to attend and it feels like I'm soon gonna run from place to place like a headless chicken. x) Oh well, at least things are finally going forward...

With that said I'll start the summary of le cruising ship trip.

Warning for hilarious shit and a lot of silly faces.

Silja Serenade arriving to the terminal. <3

A few months prior dad had informed us that he had a lot of bonus points on his Silja Line club card
that were about to expire soon and well, he booked a free cruise for us on 18-19 November with said
points, yipee! I'm certainly not the one to say no to a cruise, especially seeing how much I love being on a ship. Yep, I've been on Silja ships a lot ever since I was a kid; I know Symphony and Serenade like my own pockets, almost. lololol

So me, Hasakitsuki and Jäätynyt Enkeli left our little home hole on the evening of 17th November, a Monday. This time instead of a suitcase I had one of these sport bag-ish travel bags with me, except that the gray bag is probably as old as me or something. xD I swear I've seen it around all my life and it's still alive and kicking. Nostalgic bag. <3 I wasn't too happy about it while we walked to Jäätynyt Enkeli's place to get our ride to Kemi's train station though, and that's because it was heavy to carry and murdered my arm. :'D

When we got to the train station we had a few hours to spare before the train would arrive and so, of course, we went to buy some provisions from the nearby Lidl. Yep, it has turned into a tradition by now lol. When the train finally arrived at 19:40 something (Finnish local time) we boarded it and then started the long journey to Helsinki. Of course sitting in a train for like 7 hours is among the list of "boredom will surely occur", so it did. Luckily the whole company was equipped with PSP's and Monster Hunter games and so we killed some dickheads Khezus and everything was alright. :D What wasn't alright was when it became late and the rest of the train cart proceeded to go sleep and I had turned into a night owl with big glaring eyes that just wouldn't shut themselves. I firmly believe I was up to around 2 in the night before I even started feeling tired and well, sleeping in a train is something I just can't do and that equals horrible sleep deprivation when morning dawns. So it did.

07:06 our train arrived in Helsinki, it's still dark and I'm fumbling out of the train with my brain filled with lag and my eyebags probably dragging on the floor after me. I guess I looked more zombie than human and it took me a while to come back to the living world. Somewhere around this point even the letter R on the VR train company's logo looked like the signature Silja Line seal logo to me – ONCE SEEN IT CANNOT BE UNSEEN.

Yeah, I was tired. :-DD

Eventually I did return to normal and that was when we spotted the Kluuvi shopping center thingy along the way to the ship terminal. I had memorized that a Subway should be in there somewhere (yeah, we checked nearest Subways in Helsinki before departure) and sure there was one – too bad it wasn't even open yet.

We dragged ourselves forward and into the Olympia Terminal, aka where the cruising ship would leave. We were so early in the terminal that we even saw the Silja Serenade arrive, aka the ship we would take!
Yep, it's the picture in the beginning of this post. :) We also saw Viking
Line's Gabriella cruise ship arrive and another Viking Line ship arrive
and leave.

We lagged in the terminal until the city woke up and then me and Hasakitsuki headed back out to go to the Subway, because we were hungry like titans. After cramming some bread into our black holes –aka hungry stomachs– we headed back to the terminal. We passed some hours in the terminal and then finally our forth member showed up –Sipsinekku. But before that I went to the bathroom to put on a wig because my hair didn't look like anything. Also, when I washed my hands in the bathroom I noticed that the soap smelled like men's shaving cream or something. xD

Not too long after Sipsinekku showed up it was boarding time and we headed towards Silja Serenade, passed the obligatory ship photo and I smelled my drugs the ship smell again, hohoho. <3 *noodle arms*

View of Promenade deck.

Inside the ship we first made our way into deck 10 and into our cabin on said deck. We had a Promenade cabin for 4 people, in other words we had a window view into the main Promenade deck on deck 7. It's comfy and what I'm used to. :3 With our stuff spread all over the cabin we headed out to go stroll around the ship, especially the Promenade deck (aka shopping deck). I quickly noticed that it looked a bit different from what I was used to but didn't pay it any more attention.
We went downstairs to deck 6 to check what the ship buffet had to offer. To our disappointment it wasn't the usual varied menu but Christmas foods. ONLY CHRISTMAS FOODS. IN NOVEMBER. D: Okay, I'm sure it would have been very good quality food –as it usually is in cruising ships– and all but I'm one of those weird people who dislike pretty much all the typical foods you eat in Sweden/Finland during Christmas and thus I didn't really want to spend like 40 € on it, knowing it would be unlikely that I would eat for the money's worth. :( Yeah I'm weird, I dislike Christmas foods and I certainly don't want to eat it a month before Christmas either lol. The Christmas edition buffet was pretty 'meh' to all of us so we decided against eating at the buffet, even though for at least one of us it was one of the main reasons for taking the ship. *coughbrocough*

Christmas buffet menu.
(open in full-size to read)

Instead we went to check the Tax Free shop. Now it was obvious that there had been some changes on the ship – the Tax Free shop was completely different than how I remembered it! Silja Symphony still has the shop layout that I'm used to. We were drooling over all the yummyness but decided that it's a bit pointless to stack up on candies and sweets already now because we have a second day onboard the ship too.

Tax Free shop entrance on deck 7.

Candieeeeeeees ~

Chocolatessssssss ~

After the Tax Free checking we went to check the other stores on the main deck (Promenade) and after that we were stuck camping next to the claw crane machines because Hasakitsuki wanted to win some of the Pacman ghost plushies. Here we go again...

Claw machines are addicting money eaters. xD

Hasakitsuki was trying to get the pink ghost but after like 30+ tries she had gotten an orange and a blue one, but no pink so she gave up. xD There were few pink ones to begin with and they all were placed close to the corners or somewhere else where it was virtually impossible to get them without exploding your wallet to hell and back trying to move them into a more feasible spot.

Oh, and meanwhile Hasakitsuki and Sipsinekku were trying to catch some fluffy friends I tried to take a selfie, but it didn't quite work out because I had forgotten that having Jäätynyt Enkeli close-by could only mean one thing...

... PHOTOCRASH!! XD

A bit later there was a performance starting on the Promenade deck and we stayed to watch it. It was a dance group and a few singers singing some African (?) songs and dancing to it. It was nice to watch.

I think we went back to our cabin to hang out a while or something but eventually went back to deck 7 to look for a restaurant. But between these two things something glorious was born that lasted the whole cruise – the obligatory elevator derp selfies!

And so a legend was born.

Yeah, basically it meant that every time we took the elevator from now on I took out my camera and we all pulled silly/ugly faces in the elevator mirror. It was one of the highlights of the whole trip! xD

Random nice light decoration on deck 7.

We had a ridiculous amount of trouble trying to figure out what restaurant to eat at. We always encountered one of the following problems:

1) Too expensive.

2) Don't even know half of the dishes/ingredients. :'DD

Yeah. So we kept going back and forth until we eventually settled on Mundo, the cheapest food place on the ship but also the one with the least options – a beef dish, pasta dish, salmon dish, meatball dish and two burger dishes, one normal and one vegan. I think that was about it.

But just when we were about to order food another performance started on the Promenade deck – this time an acrobat duo. Gosh, let me say they were fantastic! It felt like the law of physics didn't apply to them lol.

Acrobat performance

And so, back to eating. Me and Hasakitsuki ended up ordering the meatballs with mashed potatoes even though we had had the same dish at Silja Symphony back in August. I'm happy we shared it because there was a fair amount of food on the plate and even though we were two eating we had slight problems finishing it.

MASHED POTATOES.

After the food we did a return to the Tax Free shop and bought a kiddy party drink and some candies that we'd consume during the night. We still resisted the temptation to buy half the candies on the ship. x) After the buy-only-what-you-need-now trip we headed back to our cabin.

Elevator derp time feat. party stuff!

Back at the cabin we talked about all kinds of things and it was all just a bunch of hilarious shit in shitland. Oh, and we opened our princess drink.. or more like, I opened it because no one else managed to do it. :'D

OPEN IT, NAUW.

By the way, the drink tasted like carbonated apple juice.. with a slight after-taste of puke. :'D Way to go!

After herpderping until we ran out of topics to talk about everyone started slowly preparing to go sleep. Of course this was my opportunity to go into the bathroom –where the biggest mirror was– and try to get some photos of my outfit of the day, huehuehue. Too bad I only managed to get one decent photo and I gave up rather quickly because I kept getting blurred shots. :<

My outfit on 18th November.

With picture proof of my outfit I headed to the shower and then into bed. Oh sweet lord how godly the ship beds felt after the train ride and the meat arms, meat legs, stuck necks and pains all over the place. </3 It felt like I never wanted to separate from the ship bed ever again...

But no. Morning came and we had arrived in Stockholm, which meant it was time to drag up our asses from the bed and head for breakfast. Jäätynyt Enkeli and Sipsinekku went ahead because they wanted to explore Stockholm but me and Hasakitsuki couldn't care less so we went to breakfast a bit later. Breakfast meant Mundo and our breakfast consisted of random sweet bakeries, oopsie.

Elevator derp, heading for breakfast!

After breakfast we went to randomly walk around the ship and just check out all the places; I noticed that the whole Sunflower Oasis spa area was completely renewed! o_o Man I want to go there someday!

After photoshooting I got hungry and tired so we headed for Mundo again and bought macarons for snacks. We took one of every color and shared them. :D We agreed on the pink raspberry one being the best one, by far. The yellow one tasted surprisingly much like those Swedish waffle biscuits with lemon filling...

Macarons, yum!

We even went to Silja Land and noticed that the pirate ship was slightly different when compared to the one on Silja Symphony. Also the octopus slide was light pink while on Symphony it's a dark plum violet. :'D Oh, and there was also this one Harry Potter thingy hanging on the wall!

Harry Potter stuff!

I also noticed a beautiful miss on a sign next to the ball pool thingy.

For kids aged between 4-101 years :-DD <3

When Jäätynyt Enkeli and Sipsinekku returned we went to spend some time at the claw machines again and then we were just lagging around waiting for the ship to move out to the sea. When the ship left Stockholm the Tax Free store opened again and this of course meant that we went to stock up on candies, this time for real. xD

Elevator derp, heading for candy shopping!

But nope, you shall not get any photos of the candies and sweets that we bought, huehuehue ~

Instead you'll get a pic of some elevators! :D

Not happy? 8C

Then have a pretty 3D ship wooden painting! :'DD

At some point we all were walking around the outside deck and we spotted a lifebuoy. We had some laughs because it had a text
above it saying "EXP. 2019" or something like that and we were joking
that if 'exp' meant expiry date then if someone needed the lifebuoy it
would go like "lol we can't use it because it has expired :-DD" and if 'exp' meant experience points then it would need to be leveled up like in Pokémon games. xD Yeah, don't ask. lolol

Random view of the Promenade deck seen from above.

Before too long we all were hungry and so we derped our way back to deck 7 and the second edition of our neverending "where do we eat?" quest had begun. xD We ultimately decided on eating at another restaurant –a nicer one– of which I can't remember the name right now. Hasakitsuki had been feeling kinda sick so again we shared a portion because she wasn't sure that she could eat a full dish. We ended up sharing some eggplant tortellini food that was pretty tasty.

le food.

I don't really remember what we did after this. xD I do remember that the acrobat performance was on this day too and we went to watch it once more. It was pretty much the same except for some slight differences, different music and different outfits. Still highly enjoyable to watch and it didn't get boring either because it was a short performance. Otherwise I guess we just derped and strolled around the ship, checking the shops and just spending time together. Oh, and taking elevator derp selfies every time we used an elevator. <3

Superman, of course! :-DD
(it's some random question thingy for kids)

When it got late we headed back for our cabin and this time we had with us another of those kiddy party drinks. It was the Cars cartoon one with strawberry flavor and everyone agreed on this one being better than the apple Disney Princess one. Pommac still beats them all though. :P
Again we spent the night talking about hilarious things, doing hilarious things and just laughing our asses off.. and then we went to sleep. :') But oh did it feel like a grim end to wake up the following morning and realize that there would be no more ship beds for me – just another tedious train trip back home oh god. ;_; Yeah, it felt so bad lol.
The final morning on the ship we all woke up and headed for breakfast together. I can't exactly say that our breakfast especially followed any recommended intake model... xD

Ship breakfast, yolo!
(oh and that's a cronut, not a donut)

Even on the last morning we couldn't keep ourselves from being herpaderp.

Normal breakfast situation. xD

I don't have so much more to say about the cruise – it was a blast and I regret nothing! XD Definitely want to do it again with a bunch of friends! Cruises are the best, so comfy and abfdskajhkfd;djk. <3
But hey, if you can still handle more goofy faces then head on over to le cruise trip companions summaries here, here and here as well!

Oh, but before I go I just want to say that I've found the love of my life. It's located in Helsinki, it's quite expensive but oh lawd is it worth it! <3 Yes ladies and gents, I'm talking about the bubble tea shop in the train station! Go do yourself a favor and buy a drink, it's like the best thing ever!

Bubble tea shop. <3

All the bubble tea jellies. <3

And the ready bubble teas. <3
Mine is the light violet one in the middle, Taro milky tea with lychee and strawberry bubbles.

I regret that I didn't know about it earlier, man it's so good. ;A; <3

1 comment:

This cruise was one big adventure! :'D Thank you so much for time well spent! <3 The pics on this post are just candy for the herpderp part of the brain. :'D And I want to photoshoot on a ship again! <3

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The name is Kai, I'm a young man underneath the northern lights in Sweden & Finland! My heart beats for cosplay, Japanese popular culture, video games, alternative fashion, poetry, blogging, photography etc. I'm that one metalhead guy who (not so) secretly also likes unicorns and cute things. I hope you enjoy your time reading and you're much welcome to follow my blog if you like it! ♥ ^_^